R&B Is Dying

R&B is dying, and it seems like no one cares or they just aren’t speaking up enough. I WHOLE HEARTINGLY LOVE R&B TO MY CORE! So why would I want it to go away? The only time you can hear a good selection of R&B on the radio is when you turn it to an Urban Adult Contemporary (Urban AC) station. The regular “Urban” stations are only playing what I like to call “Trap R&B”. Trap R&B is someone singing over Hip-Hop beats with Hip-Hop flows (melodies). That is not R&B, it is just a child of R&B and Hip-Hop, just like Country Pop isn’t Country, it’s just a child of Country and Pop. Most of the artists that used to sing R&B have now moved into Trap R&B and/or Dance R&B…some have even gone straight Pop. I feel that labels have pushed their artists to move into different genres and sub genres while completely knowing what they are doing, and are to blame for the dying R&B genre. I feel it’s inefficient and simply stupid to send R&B tracks to a station that doesn’t have some place to play R&B songs, so I make sure I look at the station’s programming. So as I’m filtering through radio stations in order to send my singles out, I see shows that consist of Indie, Alternative and Hip-Hop. I click on the Hip-Hop music director’s email link and I see that it’s “urban@etc.com”. Then I start to think, wait, are the just clumping all “Urban” music, which is anything that isn’t Pop or Rock related, in one setting? Hip-Hop/Rap and R&B are two separate genres, meant to provide two different feelings. 9 x outta 10, you groove to R&B and get “crunk/turn-up” to Hip-Hop/Rap. The BPM’s are different and are meant to be different. I then go ahead and click on the Hip-Hop DJ’s show playlist to see what songs have been in rotation. I look and see some R&B songs and then I think, so is R&B not good enough anymore to have its own show or even own music directors? Rock and Indie Rock/Indie Alternative Rock can clearly be clumped together like they do Hip-Hop and R&B…but they don’t. Anyway, I see these every now and then R&B songs on these Hip-Hop shows, and believe me…these R&B songs are sparse (not counting the Trap R&B songs that sound like Hip-Hop/Rap anyway). I’ve also noticed when a Pop artist has made that move to R&B, they still classify them as Pop. Is it a downgrade to be classified as an R&B artist? Is being an R&B artist not honorable anymore? Album charts suck anyway because of piracy or people just simply have the shortest attention span ever known to man, but R&B artist aren’t even getting okay numbers. Once again, Pop R&B, Dance R&B, and Trap R&B don’t count. People aren’t to blame; labels are always the ones to blame. They decided what music gets to the masses because they have the money to have the power to make you think you like something when you don’t. Let’s say you hear a song and you don’t like it, the radio stations you listen to keep playing it over and over; you will start to think “oh it’s not that bad” and then in turn like the song without even realizing it. So I say all of this to bring my point full circle, R&B is dying. The reasons are: they don’t seem to notice, they notice but don’t care or they don’t care because they are a part of the R&B phase out; which is all very sad.